Rhina P. Espaillat

Pruning Burning Bushes

Arts & Literature

“Sarah Wells's droll, evocative title perfectly fits her collection of poems, a series of 'double exposures' that superimpose the biblical on a background of rural Ohio. On that quilt-like ground, individual poems rich in the specifics of their time and place offer scenes from married life and motherhood, aging, and the process of accepting (but not erasing) inevitable losses . . . This is a book to savor, not in haste but slowly, so as to enjoy the unobtrusive rightness of the language, the mature but unjaded view of the human condition, the depth under the playfulness.”